I posted this on Vonage Canada but am posting it here as well for those who are thinking about signing up.

I signed up for Vonage last week and on the whole have been totally satisfied.

Of course the network outage on Friday was a major bummer but unless that becomes an everyday thing I think I can live with it.

I run my business out of my home and do a lot of calls into the GTA (Toronto). I had a flat rate provider that gave me unlimited calls to anywhere in Ontario for 15.00 per month but I still had to pay for long distance outside Ontario and most of my customer still have to pay to call me. My total ld costs per month were about 85.00 cdn.

The advantage of having a 416 number really appealed to me but I was worried about voice quality.

So after doing some research on these forums I decided to give it a try.

Hook up was as easy as plugging my phone into the adaptor and the adaptor into an open port on my router.

Sign up was equally easy.

My first call however was disappointing. The quality was terrible. It sounded like a bad cell phone.

I soon realized however that my wife was downloading files via bit-torrent and that was choking my pipe because those types of p2p applications allow people to upload the same file you are downloading simultaneously.

So when those files were finished downloading I tried again.

The voice quality was perfect. In fact I have asked many people that I have talked to over the course of the week if they could tell I was on a Voip phone and none of them could. In fact one person said "it sounds like you are in the next room"

I will hang on to this service unless the outages become a continual factor.